From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org ([69.77.167.62] helo=lists.gentoo.org) by finch.gentoo.org with esmtp (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1JM5Dq-000103-OI for garchives@archives.gentoo.org; Mon, 04 Feb 2008 17:35:11 +0000 Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 44B1BE04A6; Mon, 4 Feb 2008 17:35:09 +0000 (UTC) Received: from fg-out-1718.google.com (fg-out-1718.google.com [72.14.220.156]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C97C5E04A6 for ; Mon, 4 Feb 2008 17:35:08 +0000 (UTC) Received: by fg-out-1718.google.com with SMTP id e21so2020704fga.14 for ; Mon, 04 Feb 2008 09:35:08 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.86.89.4 with SMTP id m4mr6851084fgb.12.1202146507910; Mon, 04 Feb 2008 09:35:07 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.86.60.17 with HTTP; Mon, 4 Feb 2008 09:35:07 -0800 (PST) Message-ID: <92e3e00f0802040935j5414a163y3455c1e0c3cd7422@mail.gmail.com> Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2008 18:35:07 +0100 From: "Jonas Bernoulli" To: gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org Subject: [gentoo-dev] new portage categories Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Id: Gentoo Linux mail X-BeenThere: gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org Reply-to: gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline X-Archives-Salt: e8964472-263e-4a8b-ad16-f8ac7d0ce6e1 X-Archives-Hash: fce04f4c082471c945233cdff9263371 Hello Recently I started to exclude parts of the portage tree for various reasons. One of them is that I play with the thought of creating my own minidistro/livecd based on Gentoo. So keep in mind that I don't think that it is in general useful to trim the portage tree to the extend that I have. One of the obvious things one might start out with is to exclude kde when one prefers gnome or vice versa. I extended this to exclude packages within on category that fulfill the same purpose. E.g. I use app-admin/metalog so it doesn't make much sense to include all the other loggers. Since the decision for metalog at the time was not substantiated at the time a also made a note basically saying "is metalog really the best? these are the alternatives". Once I have the time I might include the other loggers again and evaluate them. But to make the list of loggers I basically had to read through the descriptions of all packages in app-admin to sort out all loggers (I could have searched but I wanted to make sure I don't miss anything). Since I have not done this for loggers only this was/is a lot of work and I therefor asked myself why are there no categories like app-log or app-cron. So I ask you: why are there no such categories? Of course I can imagine a few reasons myself for not having more categories: (1) a category must in general include n packages (2) more categories are evil, once we start creating new once there is no end (3) moving packages in the tree is bad, things break (4) who does all the work (5) subcategories would be better, but to implement this... .... Please point me to any discussions on this subject. Keep in mind I am not demanding new categories, I am not even asking for them to be created. I simply would like to know why there aren't more. And if you developers are also interested in more categories I would love to make some suggestions and help with looking through the tree to see which packages would have to be moved. Reasons why more categories might be usefull: (1) Easier to find new packages One great benefit of going through the tree to exclude packages was for me that I came across many great packages I did not know about. The likeliness of this would be increased e.g. for the category app-admin, if I did not have to read the DESCRIPTION of ~8 loggers even though I already have selected one and currently am not at all interested in evaluating the alternatives. In addition there are ~14 logfile analysers of some sort in app-admin ~4 logfile rotators ~2 other log related packages. And some more can probably be found in app-misc, x11-apps and x11-misc. So all in all at least ~30 packages that have to do with logging, why not create app-log? (2) Easier to find alternatives to a package Need a logger? See what is in app-log! (3) Makes it less likely that similar packages end up in different categories Just an example app-admin/pwcrypt DESCRIPTION="An improved version of cli-crypt (encrypts data sent to it from the cli) but cli-crypt is in app-crypt" By the way why is there app-crypt but not app-log? There are other things I noticed when weeding through the tree. E.g. some DESCRIPTIONs start with a capitalized letter others don't. Some end with a period, others don't. Some for now apparent reason start with "foo is an application to do bar" instead of "do bar". I understand that it is not very interesting for any developer to fix such minor errors, and I am not asking anyone to do something about it. But I would like to know if there is any change that new categories are created if I or others collect lists of packages that could be moved to new categories. And yes I understand that the work doesn't end here and would possibly also help finding packages whose dependencies would have to be modified. For me also this is not exactly fun. But since I do this kind of work for my own personal benefit at the moment I might as well do it in a way that benefits others as well. -- Jonas -- gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list